Cette Maison: a reflexive, imaginative reckoning with the death of a loved one

In her debut feature Cette Maison, Haitian Canadian filmmaker Miryam Charles returns to a site of personal tragedy and profound trauma for her family. The unresolved death of her teenage cousin Tessa, who was found hanged in 2008 in a suspected suicide, is the bruise at the heart of this slow, strange, beautiful film, which, ten years after the loss, stages a cathartic reckoning with the reverberations of grief and diasporic displacement. It uses film to create an alternative future for the dead girl and bring a family nearer to closure.

Shot on 16mm stock, this textured experimental work merges personal biography and diaristic landscape footage with staged re-enactments of Tessa’s life. Through theatrical indoor sets, distinctive props and stylised, often stilted dialogue, the film draws attention to its own construction as a fiction. “Choosing fiction,” Charles told Marius Hrdy in an interview for Notebook earlier this year, “really helped me to create some kind of distance, to actually find the courage to tell the story that I wanted to tell.”

Cette Maison visualises a speculative outcome for Tessa that shuttles us into the domain of the ghost story. Amid the jumbled layers of imagined scenarios and fading memories, the actress Schelby Jean-Baptiste brings Tessa to life with a muted, haunting performance that is largely delivered directly to camera or in emotive voiceover. “Anything is possible here” becomes a mantra, or an invocation, in the film – one that allows for magical-realist leaps that leave the film untethered to reality. But the film does pull back into real-life events outside of the tragedy, as when Tessa’s family gather around the television to witness the results of the 1995 Québec referendum on independence from Canada. As much as Cette Maison takes flight into fantasy, real life is never too far away.

Objects in the film also contain some indexical link to the real world, one that is felt, even if you don’t know the objects’ origins, in the aura of personal symbolism that emanates from them. The house of the title emerges as an imaginal space for the director’s confrontation with loss and displacement. Charles originally wanted to film in Tessa’s real family home but found it too painful; at one point, we see handheld diary footage of Charles driving around the building in the rain, unable to pluck up the courage to make the journey inside. Instead, the film recreates the domestic interiors through real family photographs, mementos, and “all kinds of trinkets that represent our past lives, our future lives”.

If the true-crime element is the aching centre of the film, Haiti is the spiritual homeland that encircles it, a space that is as much imagined as Tessa’s fantastical trajectory. Jean-Baptiste’s voiceover sets this up early, categorising the unfolding story as a “fluid journey through time and space”. This isn’t just a path between life and afterlife, past and future, but between several geographical spaces: Canada, the United States, and Haiti. Footage of lush Caribbean scenery, reminiscent of some of Charles’ early shorts, implies Haiti, although the critic Alexandra Martinez has pointed out that what we’re actually seeing is shots of Dominica. Evidently the verdant imagery functions as a stand-in for the family’s chimerical dreams of return. In one of the film’s most startling images, the body of Tessa, covered in a sheet, is superimposed on the mountainous scenery of ‘Haiti’, merging the child’s body with the landscape. Thanks to the magic of cinema, Charles implies, Tessa can make that journey home beside her mother. The film’s beauty also shines through in the scenes of intergenerational cooking and eating, the camera framing glistening plates of accra fritters and lalo – jute-leaf stew – to reclaim joy, tactility and pleasure for Tessa and her family.

As an act of remembering and restitution, Cette Maison is an admirable and imaginative work. But its construction from lacunae and stillness and its narrative ephemerality ultimately keep the viewer at a distance. Charles’s reliance on the remove of fiction to confront the project often translates into remoteness, hiding an emotional truth we’re not quite able to access. While we never actually see the director, her guiding presence is felt behind the camera, in the series of decisions – and indecisions – that shape the film. Cette Maison ultimately suggests that the question of how to tell a personal story of violence and loss is an impossible quandary, returned to again and again but never fully resolved.

► Cette Maison is in UK cinemas now.